JanMastodon has taken the strategic decision not to accept venture capital investments for growth, but rather restructure to a European non-profit organisation. 👏
Aaron@jan More of this, please. Imagine if all companies followed this model. Better yet, if they all functioned as cooperatives. No billionaire shareholders, feeding off every single economic exchange between us lowly serfs. No perverse incentives to satisfy those shareholders' demands for profit at the expense of the needs of workers and users/consumers/clients. No well-defined concept of "profit" in the first place, because any extra money would be reinvested back into infrastructure or passed back to customers and workers via lower prices or better wages.
Murdoc Addams 🧛🏻
🇨🇦@hosford42 @jan
Mostly sounds good, but I think that as long as money exists, there will be profit, and it will spoil things. The USSR made profit outright illegal, and they still ended up weakening those laws until it devolved into the kleptocracy it is now. The lure of accumulating wealth was too strong even for them.
Mostly sounds good, but I think that as long as money exists, there will be profit, and it will spoil things. The USSR made profit outright illegal, and they still ended up weakening those laws until it devolved into the kleptocracy it is now. The lure of accumulating wealth was too strong even for them.
@murdoc We shouldn't use that as an excuse to avoid taking steps in the right direction. First, we have to break society's addiction to profit. Then we can take further steps.
Honestly, I don't think money itself is the problem; it's just IOUs. It's how we think about wealth, earning, sharing, society benefit, personal worth, work, etc. People will always cheat and steal and hoard. They did that before money, and they will do it after money. But profit, as a concept, is a normalization of that process, treating it as legal, morally acceptable, or even virtuous. We have whole legal systems and societal conventions built up around that concept, making it easy for those with wealth to extract more, while acting as if they somehow benefit the rest of us. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was mutated from a simple observation that selfish and altruistic goals can be aligned sometimes by the market, into justification for the entrenchment of ongoing pillaging of the poor by the rich.
@hosford42
I was not suggesting that we don't take steps. Sorry if I gave that impression. I've been advocating for stuff like this for decades now. 
I agree that money and our current system simply makes this kind of bad behavior much easier. I also agree that we need to break society's "addiction" to profit, but only to be followed up by changing the system so that we can remove the "motive and means" to hoard wealth. That's why I used the USSR as an example, because they did break that addiction, as much as anyone could anyway. But as long as the motive and means remain, that minority that will continue to seek to hoard wealth will do so, and in turn gather power to change the system back (which is why we should get rid of politics too). That's what happened to them. You have to change the rules of the game enough so that people like that aren't rewarded, so that there is no longer any means and motive to do so. Then the hoarding of wealth not only becomes mostly impossible, but what little remains possible simply becomes unprofitable to do, so there is no motivation.
@murdoc The difficulty, I think, is in finding a practical way to make that happen. I think most people are mediocre, neither profoundly selfish nor profoundly giving, but there are, and always will be, outliers. Any plan that overlooks the inevitable existence of people who only care about themselves, no matter what you do or say, is doomed to failure. The only way to deal with such people, aside from violence (which I do not espouse), is to make selfish interests align with altruistic ones. You can't erase selfishness from existence. You can only entrain it to serve the greater good. Even Ferengi must have a place in the Federation.
@hosford42
Luckily I happen to know of a way that does this well. And although I can introduce parts of it on here, you can't really see how well it handles this problem until you've learned all the parts of it and how it works together. It's just like learning about any machine, like say a car, when you don't know anything about such things. You have to learn how all the parts work and how they work together to see how a carriage can truly be horseless.
If you haven't seen me talk about it before, it's called Technocracy (named long before any current use of the word). You can read about it here: https://www.technate.org and I'm happy to answer questions.
As for selfishness and greed, I don't believe that they are intrinsic traits of humanity. I realize that all of human history tells us otherwise, but if you've never seen iron above a certain temperature, then you'd have good reason to believe that it is always dull and solid. But being those are not intrinsic traits to iron. Change its environment enough, and its behavior changes a lot.
Similarly, I think that selfishness is not an intrinsic trait, but rather a means to an end. Find a different way to satisfy those ends, and there is no longer any need for those means. If you take a look at Technocracy, I think that you'll see what I mean.
@murdoc It sounds like you're suggesting that psychopathy and sociopathy aren't real things. That is difficult to swallow, having met numerous real-life examples.
How does this proposed system work, in a nutshell. I noodled around the website you linked for a bit, but couldn't find a clear summary.
@hosford42
What you want is the Beginner's page: https://www.technate.org/tiki-index.php?page=Begin
It's starts with a simple definition, then briefly goes over the basic points, then expands on that in bigger sections and then has links to further expand on various topics as you like. I can't think of a better way to summarize this subject than is found there. It's the first link on the front page under "Starting Points" in case you're wondering how to get there.
And no, of course I am not suggesting that psychopathy and sociopathy are not real things. These are accounted for in the design. It's difficult to say in brief how because several different aspects of the design contribute to it, and I'd have to describe how each works and how they work with each other. And this is because there are different ways that it can influence behavior. If there any specific behaviors that you are concerned about, I can try to answer in regard to those. Other than that, you kind of have to see how the whole thing works to get a clear picture.